Thursday, August 15, 2013

“A
brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of
Mexico City stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes
and early dusklights. Down to it we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard,
straight toward the heart of town at Reforma. Kids played soccer in enormous
sad fields and threw up dust. Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to know if we
wanted girls. No, we didn’t want girls now. Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out
on the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys. Soon night would
come. Then the city roared in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and
theaters and many lights. Newsboys yelled at us. Mechanics slouched by,
barefoot, with wrenches and rags. Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut across us and
surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic. The noise was incredible. No
mufflers are used on Mexican cars. Horns are batted with glee continual. “Whee!”
yelled Dean. “Look out!” He staggered the car through the traffic and played
with everybody. He drove like an Indian. He got on a circular glorietta drive
on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars
at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and
jumped with joy. “This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of! Everybody goes!” An
ambulance came balling through. American ambulances dart and weave through
traffic with siren blowing; the great world-wide Fellahin Indian ambulances
merely come through at eighty miles and hour in the city streets, and everybody
just has to get out of the way and they don’t pause for anybody or any
circumstances and fly straight through. We saw it reeling out of sight on
skittering wheels in the breaking –up moil of dense downtown traffic. The
drivers were Indians. People, even old ladies, ran for buses that never
stopped. Young Mexico City businessmen made bets and ran by squads for buses
and athletically jumped them. The bus-drivers were barefoot, sneering and
insane and sat low and squat in T-shirts at the low, enormous wheels. Ikons
burned over them. The lights in the buses were greenish, and dark faces were
lined on wooden benches.

“In
downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and
long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them
selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat
chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with
open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You
had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was
the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the
wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and
nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along
the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the
night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for
forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of
marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba—also wandering singing
guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink
of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two
cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped
in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the
sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet
stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On
corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in
tortillas and served them with hot sauce on newspaper napkins. This was the
great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would
find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like
at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and
holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed
and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.”

Monday, August 12, 2013

So
here’s an idea I’ve been toying with: I’m one of roughly two million people on
earth who speak Slovenian (Sounds like a lot, but that equates to less than 3
hundredths of one percent of the world’s population.) The vast majority of the
seven billion other people on earth have never even heard of
Slovenia—and if they have, I’d bet good money that they’ve never picked up a
book of Slovene literature a) because it’s
a small country, b) because it’s only 20
years old, but c) mainly because most of
the Slovene canon remains untranslated.

And
while there are a few academics out there who are slowly working their way
through a couple of the most important works, the door is wide open for, say, a
Slovene-speaking native English speaker, and an English-speaking native Slovene
speaker to put their heads together and start translating some stuff. Mrs. DeMarest and I just happen to fit the
bill. So we’ll see… This would be a
years-long project, of course, and a huge commitment of free time, but it might
just be something I’d look back on with immense satisfaction.

Anyway, while mulling this over I was reminded of a passage from Don Quixote that rang true to me at the time:

“…it
seems to me that translating from one language to another, unless it is from
Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish
tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are
covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness
and color of the right side”

Friday, August 9, 2013

It’s
been a while since we’ve done one of these, but today’s first line is, in my
opinion, kind of a stinker, even though it leads into one of my favorite books.
The first two lines, as a matter of fact, are bits of back story we don’t
really need, and that don’t figure in the rest of the novel. But that third line , now, that third line is
great. If you ask me, it is the rightful heir to the first line throne. And if I were Kerouac’s editor, I would have lopped off the first two and made
that one my opener:

“I
first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a
serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something
to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was
dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty
began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that
I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and
never taking off.”

Thursday, August 8, 2013

“My bladder was beginning to be
insistent, too, and though I was armed with my Policeman’s Friend and would
have ordinarily have let fly with the secret pleasure of a bedwetter, I
couldn’t see myself pissing down a tube with a lady standing six feet from me.”

—From Wallace Stegner’s Angle
of Repose

The internet is surprisingly short on
information about the “Policeman’s Friend” apparatus that Stegner’s narrator is
describing above, but I imagine it’s a close cousin of the Stadium Pal "accessory" described by
David Sedaris below. Another reason to love curmudeonly ol’ Lyman Ward:

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Margaret
Mitchell and Mark Twain are two authors who are often discussed in the context
of racism in literature. Gone With the
Wind and The Adventures of Huck Finn are
two of the most frequently banned books across the U.S.

But
while debate rages in school boards across the country, it’s interesting to
note that in their personal lives Mitchell and Twain were quite generous to aspiring
black professional students. Over a number of years Mitchell secretly funded dozens
of African American medical students at Morehouse college and elsewhere,
helping to lift up a class of black professionals in the segregated South.

And
while Twain’s philanthropy centered on one student in particular, it may have
had an even more powerful impact on society. Warner T. McGuinn, the man whose
room and board Twain paid at Yale Law School, graduated #1 in his class and
went on to become a force in the early civil rights movement in Maryland and a mentor to
Thurgood Marshall. In a letter to the dean of the law school, Twain explained his reasoning for supporting McGuinn:

“I
do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask for
the benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We
have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, and we
should pay for it.”

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Here’s
one I really want to see: James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of
Walter Mitty” is being re-made into a movie this year. The last time this was
tried, in 1947, Danny Kaye turned the picture into a screwball comedy only loosely
based on the original. Okay, fine, whatever. Thurber was a very humorous
writer, and “Mitty” was a slightly campy tale that could certainly be taken
that direction.

This
time around Ben Stiller acts and directs in a reboot that promises to be much
truer to the heart of “Mitty.” I can’t comment on its merits as a
true-to-the-story adaptation, but it looks like it’ll deliver far less mad-cap
comedy, and far more insight into the secret psyche of the inveterate
daydreamer- which is really what the original story was all about.

But
don’t take my word for it. Here is a link to the original story, and here is
Stiller’s latest trailer:

For
comparison, have a look at the 1947 version:

We're definitely getting better at movie trailers, but I also think we’re getting better at this adaptation thing…